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Link-O-Rama!

It’s Holy Week, and that means I’m busy with Church (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday!) and cleaning up so the Easter Bunny isn’t hiding eggs in the clutter of our downstairs family room. Oh, and laundry, because no one wants our family to show up au natural for the Easter Vigil.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t excellent things to read! Just have a gander at some of the super-awesome stuff that some of my favorite bloggers have been putting out while I’m being a total slacker and avoiding washing the kitchen floor again.

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If I hadn’t just been to Confession yesterday, Simcha’s article on sin would’ve inspired me to head over there tonight. It’s like a smack upside the head. Here’s a sample:

… Face it: we are all addicts. We are all spiritual criminals. We are all monsters of selfishness. Our sins are disgusting—all of them, mortal, venial, thought, word, and deed. Venial sin isn’t trivial or separate from mortal sin: it is what makes mortal sin possible, bearing it up and supporting it like a rotten ship on an ocean of sewage. …

And Hallie has written some beautiful insights on marriage – and how it’s not always fun. (Us old married people know this, but it’s a truly difficult lesson to pass on to our kids, what with the normalcy of broken homes.)

…But by the simple, passive act of staying, I learned what wiser and more experienced couples could have told me but which I would have refused to believe until I’d experienced it myself: marriage is not always fun; there aren’t always rewards for your gifts of love; and ultimately profound self-sacrifice is the name of the game. While my younger self, cheeks pinked with the fresh blooms of love, would have been terribly disillusioned by that proposition, over time I came to see that the valleys, rather than being valueless experiences we can only ever grit our teeth through, are gifts. Without these moments of marital aridity we’d never have the opportunity to choose love. …

… But the most interesting part of it was the emphasis on the sexual behavior of women. Nubel sounds the battle cry, “Ladies, it’s time for a sex strike!” (emphasis mine), and then proceeds to list examples of women effecting change in society through thoughtful abstinence. And thus she reveals her understanding of something that everyone knows but nobody wants to admit: Women hold all the cards when it comes to sex. As a gender, men want sex more than women do, and they are willing to go to great lengths to get it. They’ll change their behavior. They’ll reconsider their ideas. Granted, men aren’t mindless animals who will do anything for sex (well, not most of them, anyway), but the fewer opportunities there are in the culture for intimacy with women, the more willing men are to meet women’s conditions for it. …

Speaking of women, this touching piece at Barefoot and Pregnant gave me a new perspective on how women in crisis are treated – and the things they are told – by our Culture of Death.

Amidst the debates swirling around about defunding Planned Parenthood, some oft-repeated catch phrases are being tossed around like word grenades. One of these are “women in crisis.” I’m sick and tired of hearing about “women in crisis” and how they need access to emergency contraception and abortions. That is a huge, steaming pile of lies, propagated by people who like to murder babies. Women in crisis do not need access to abortions. What they need is love, support, a safe place to live, and people (even strangers!) who will tell them the truth: that they are more than capable of being a mother. That they can do this. That their crisis, no matter how terrible, will be healed in the long, sometimes painful, always joyful process of becoming a mother.Think this makes me heartless, speaking from my comfortable suburban home, having never known trials in my cushy little life?

What really struck me, as I read this, was that throughout childhood, our girls are being given contradicting messages. “You can do anything! You’re better than boys!” is given right alongside “You can’t say no to sex! Have some condoms!” Girls are being told “You are powerful!” and “Men will respect you more if you sleep around and don’t think sex is a big deal!” And when sex leads to the thing it’s there for – making a new person – they are told that isn’t what it was really for and that they actually can’t do anything, as long as that baby is around. Suddenly, it’s all about how incompetent they are. “You can’t juggle school and a baby. You can’t put school off for a baby. You can’t be a mother now. You can’t, you can’t, you can’t!” Suddenly, girls are just weak and pitiful and not well-suited for the very thing that our Creator has actually made us for! How sad. How pathetic. We Pro Lifers really need to be sure we step into this gap here and reassure young women that they can, indeed, be more than another abortion statistic. And that life is not over if you drop out of school. And that motherhood is a vocation worth living!

And now for something completely different. This video might be one of the most perfect combinations ever: Shakespeare crossed with the greatest standup bit to ever be done. I found this thanks to the great and wonderful Elizabeth Scalia, the Anchoress.